Claus Tofte Nielsen is stepping down as chair of the ICMA Covered Bond Investor Council, it was announced at the ICMA CBIC & The Covered Bond Report Investor Conference in Frankfurt today (Thursday).

Nielsen was one of the founding members of the investor council and has chaired it since its inception in 2009. Martin Scheck, chief executive of the International Capital Market Association, announced the move in a welcome address at the conference, thanking Nielsen for his work.

Nielsen will be relinquishing his post with effect from tomorrow (Friday). The Covered Bond Report understands that a successor has not yet been appointed, but that the process is underway.

Nielsen told The Covered Bond Report that the time had come to step down after several years at the helm of the investor body, and said that the synergies between the work of the CBIC and his latest role at Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) had become less obvious.

Nielsen has been at NBIM since 2002, joining as a portfolio manager and in July 2011 taking on a new position as head of position management allocation strategies. This department is responsible for the overall positioning of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global, which is valued at US$540bn.

Since being founded in 2009 the ICMA CBIC has been pushing for better transparency in covered bonds, and has developed a transparency template that it is encouraging issuers to use as the basis for national transparency templates.

The investor council’s transparency working group is chaired by Andreas Denger, vice chairman of the CBIC and senior portfolio manager at MEAG Munich ERGO Asset Management. Nielsen has been chair of an ICMA CBIC liquidity working group.